Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

This is an insanely cheap way for them to get software developed for their brand. A straight $100k with no significant % of income is a rip off for the developer in this market. A good branded Pong app will make millions. A similar brand only gets about 20-25% of the sales. But I'm sure they'll get plenty of entries. Ah well, to be young and ignorant again.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is essentially branding publicly available information as confidential. This 'puzzling contradiction' is the 'antithesis of the developer-friendly Apple Developer Connection' on which the iPhone SDK program is based, Yager contends. 'You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court — but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.' Anyone planning to launch an iPhone forum or open source project should have 'a lawyer draft your request for exemption, and make sure that the Apple staffer granting it personally commits to status as authorized to approve exceptions to the iPhone Registered Developer and iPhone SDK Agreements,' Yager warns."Link to Original Source

ruphus13 (890164) writes "Ruby continues to be in the spotlight, but this time for the wrong reasons. "A member of Apple's security team has discovered multiple serious security vulnerabilities in Ruby, the popular open-source scripting language. According to an advisory on the Ruby project site, Apple's Drew Yao reported at least six of the vulnerabilities, which can be exploited to cause a denial-of-service condition or the execution of arbitrary code." The article goes on to state, "These vulnerabilities are likely to crop up in just about any average ruby web application. And by "crop up" I mean "crop up exploitable from trivial user-specified parameters". It's not hard to begin imagining cases where Ruby/Rails programmers use code similar to the samples above to routinely handle user input.""Link to Original Source

Bibek Paudel point us to a BusinessWeek report on Google's interest in the cataloging and analyzing of people's DNA. Google has recently invested in DNA screening firms Navigenics and 23andMe, which test customers' DNA for characteristics such as ancestry and predisposition for certain diseases. The customers are then able to give the information to their doctors. This is not Google's first foray into the medical industry.
"Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data. 'We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful,' Google spokesman Andrew Pederson says. 'We felt it was important to get involved now, at the early stage, to better understand the information generated by this fast-moving field.'"

BlueshiftVFX writes to let us know that the writers' strike may be over. CNBC and other media are quoting former Disney CEO Michael Eisner: "It's over. They made the deal, they shook hands on the deal. It's going on Saturday to the writers in general... A deal has been made, and they'll be back to work very soon."

cheezitmike (537630) writes "ITworld.com uses the Wayback Machine to document the histories of five generic domain names: music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com, and milk.com. "In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It's easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late '90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early '90s.""Link to Original Source